With little under a day left, now is your last chance to chip in on Kickstarter for your deluxe copy of the 20th Anniversary Edition of White Wolf’s great game Mage the Ascension, and maybe get your hands on the new Quintessence Edition.

The Kickstarter saw a huge level of success, far surpassing its stated funding target. As a result, Onyx Path Publishing may also be bringing out what they are calling theUltra-Deluxe Mage 20th Quinetessence Edition,each of which will feature a three-stage tarot card representing the different editions of Mage and will be signed by game writer Satyros Phil Brucato.

The Kickstarter itself has managed to surpass pretty much all of its stretch goals, the latest of which promises a Mage Cookbook, in the style of the Werewolves Cookbook currently available from DriveThruNow.

Are you going to start weaving reality to your liking in Mage?

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7 Comments

Bought this game in 1st edition when it was first release in 1993 … and never looked back. Honestly, IMHO, the best RPG ever made (sure I will spark lots of debate with that one). Frankly, it “ruined” me for all other RPGs that followed. I was also a little heartbroken when WW released Mage the Awakening later, which seemed to take a lot of steps backward with the design and theme. Needless to say, I was delighted to see a new release for this book.

Now, i will confess two things about Mage the Ascension: 1) Certain parts of the setting and “Traditions” are a little dumb. Always played with Orphans or Technocracy. 2) A slightly more concrete, objective, and rules-driven mechanic for Paradox was needed. We built one very easily and it never let us down. It added tension to the story since players could “see” the relative likelihood of Paradox coming and weigh the risks of casting that next effect. 3) A slightly more concrete benchmark was needed for distinguishing vulgar and coincidental magic was needed. This was very easy to do and saved countless arguments that probably sounded the death knell for too many Mage the Ascension chronicles.

I agree about the game mechanics. I think the original authors wanted a true “story-driven” system and leaned a little too hard on the storytellers to drive game features like Paradox, Quiet, vulgar vs. coincidental Craft, etc. It used to lead to a lot of game-halting arguments and debates, at least in our crews. Finally I drew up a couple of charts that tracked how much PX a character had, and gave an escalating d10 chance of different levels of PX consequence. I’ll admit it took a little of the mystery out paradox, but the dice allowed enough randomness for paradox to remain unpredictable and (most importantly) allowed the game to move forward and focus on the story and characters.

I checked out the kickstarted shortcut and damn, I so WANT to do this. Have your name or character name in the book? I just wish I still had a crew that I could “trust” with this game … sadly, too many short attention spoans out there weaned on WoW and the like. Might still get the book for nostalgia’s sake.

You may be right. Then again, anyone putting that much money into the book (I think it was $135 USD for a hard copy) might tend to take it a little more seriously. Alternatively, it might just be a long list at the end of the book on a “special thanks” page or something like that. What would be EPIC is if they somehow squeezed contributors’ names into the fluff writing, etc.